Real Versions and Virtual Versions

The difference between
keep and
promote highlights an important aspect of the way that
AccuRev organizes and manages development data. It also highlights the difference between backing streams and workspace streams.

All
real development takes place in the workspace tree. The
keep command preserves the changes you’ve made to a file. Accordingly, versions created by the
keep command are called real versions. Every real version can only be created in the workspace stream.

By contrast, the
promote command does not record a change to any file. Rather, it changes availability of a change that was previously recorded with
keep. The version that
promote creates in a higher-level stream is called a
virtual version. Each virtual version is just an alias for an existing real version in some workspace stream.